the bicameral xor

One house of the legislature of the US state of Georgia passed a bill in February 1953 to make “andor” the legal successor to the awkward conjunction and/or—the new term signifying all the meanings and nuance championed by the former including “either, or, both, and or or, and and or.” The proposal however was struck down by the upper house and “andor” perished ignobly on the senate floor. Xor is the so-called “exclusive or” in logical operations that only holds true when conditions differ: the law passed one chamber but failed in the other. I wonder if there has been any linguistic lobby for the novel ways that intervening bit of punctuation, the slash, has taken on.

zener cards

Among the massive cache of documents recently declassified by the US Central Intelligence Agency one can find glosses of the research programme into remote viewing and the identification and recruitment efforts of psychic warriors. One such mental pugilist was Uri Geller—who was a bit taken aback one hearing the news that the project called Stargate was now in the public domain, considering that studies were still on-going, but he could corroborate at least some of his special assignments, like standing outside the Soviet Embassy building in Mexico City and trying to erase floppy disks telepathically or arresting the heartbeat of a hapless pig in preparation for larger prey, in addition to him being asked to produce clairvoyant sketches.

the day the earth stood still

It’s quite a coincidence that it’s almost exactly to the day five years ago, the internet went off-line in solidarity and protest to the US Congress censorship bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that would have place grave strictures on the open internet and free-exchange. By resisting, the people eventually won and Congress relented but the victory came at a high costs and we have to remain ever vigilant—hopefully, we are not so inured to creeping change that we haven’t quietly surrendered those freedoms in the intervening years. Liberties are always at peril and we ought to be vocal and owe it to ourselves to be our best and truest selves, but perhaps this is not the occasion for a black-out, as after the shut-down, we might not be allowed to come back on-line.

like flies to wanton boys or pew-pew-pew

Capitalising on a property of refraction known as the Kerr Effect, defence contractors are developing lensing techniques that would from orbit turn a patch of sky into a temporary magnifying glass by heating the atmosphere with laser beams.
Not only would this technique from on-high allow for finer detail in surveillance, it introduces the art of designing sequences of moves and manœuvres for a choreography that will be executed at the speed of light. Harnessing the same properties, advancing columns or whole cities could cloak or distort themselves, tossing out mirages to cause systems to fire on the wrong targets. At a distance, vanishingly narrow defensive measures would also include the ability to cast a disruptive index back at an incoming laser. Either pitched battles—or surprise attacks, would either literally be Blitzkrieg or go on indefinitely, robot strategists perfectly matched. I can’t think of any non-defence applications for this technology but surely there’s something out there. Maybe we could observe alien environments on intimate terms without being obtrusive or seen ourselves, and I suppose it is kind of a solace to know that one could dodge a laser beam and there’s a way to countermand even what we experience as instantaneous, though I suppose you couldn’t escape, by extension, the cruel conceit of focusing the sun’s rays on some unsuspecting insects.

atlantic wall

Messy Nessy Chic’s indices are always ripe with interesting findings and we found this week’s edition to be no exception—being especially taken by the extensive gallery of images captured by photographer Marc Wilson, curating the relics and ruins of warfare along Europe’s coasts in a four year sojourn that spanned over thirty-six thousand kilometres of beaches and rocky shores. Avoiding the better known fortifications—some of which we’ve explored here in Norway and here in France, Wilson’s work documents these stark reminders of the not so distant past, which might be fading obstacles sometimes not seen but are steadfast memorials all the same.

purchasing power or less than zero

On the first day of the World Economic Forum in Davos amidst discussion on grave income disparity, Oxfam presents a thought-provoking corollary to the already sobering news that half the wealth in the world is concentrated in the estates of eight individuals: if one, minus debt, can clear the net worth of one penny, then one has a greater fortune than forty percent of the people in the world.
Of course this claim needs some unpacking and context in order for it not to seem glib and relativistic since just like those figures about populations subsisting on less than a dollar a day, savings and loans are not the same everywhere. The poorest tenth because of indebtedness, usually generational, have a net worth of a negative trillion dollars and one has to climb several rungs of deciles just to get to zero. Nearly three billion souls are already excluded from the reckoning of those invested eight because they have no money or its all already spent and that elect-percentile need only control the half of the money in circulation that’s not leveraged—not that that gap isn’t already obscene and beckoning the pitchforks.